The foundation announced the creation of the William L. Wilkie “Marketing for a Better World” Award at the annual AMA Winter Marketing Educators’ Conference in St. Petersburg, Fla. The award recognizes and honors the life of Wilkie, the Nathe Professor of Marketing at the Mendoza College of Business.

The Wilkie Award will honor marketing thought leaders who have significantly contributed to the understanding and appreciation of marketing’s potential to positively impact the human community.

“The AMAF is extremely honored to support the Wilkie Award,” said Jerome D. Williams, AMAF chairman and Prudential Chair in Business and Research Director of The Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development, Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick. “The purpose of this award and what it stands for is the heart of the AMAF mission — to champion the marketing profession by encouraging excellence and investing in marketing that benefits society.”

Wilkie, who joined the Mendoza College faculty in 1987, has been honored by the American Marketing Association with its highest recognition, the Distinguished Marketing Educator Award. He has been recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Marketing Association’s Special Interest Group on Marketing and Society. At Notre Dame, Wilkie received the Special Presidential Award, and has been voted the BP Outstanding Teacher Award for the Mendoza College of Business by the graduating senior class.

During the awards event, Wilkie described marketing as being a complex and important field of study that monitors the wants and needs of society. “While marketing can sometimes overstep bounds in its pursuits, it also can bring wonder to, and real improvements in, people’s daily lives,” he said. “One important goal for our aggregate marketing system, therefore, is that it be both fair and efficient in its operations."

He added that along with the impressive advancements in academic marketing, there has been a shift in the perceptions about the field itself. “In our quest for increasing rigor in the ‘A journals,’ we are in danger of forgetting that marketing actually has impacts on the world we live in, and that these impacts themselves are extremely important,” he said. “I’m hopeful that this will be a major award in our field, targeted to recognizing marketing thought leaders whose work serves to highlight these issues of marketing’s impacts on the world we live in, and thus serving to enhance these impacts in the future."

Wilkie’s scholarship includes numerous journal articles, monographs and books, including a textbook, “Consumer Behavior,” that has been used in classrooms throughout the world. Wilkie has been named in several studies as a “Thought Leader” in academic marketing, and is author of an article named as a “Citation Classic in the Social Sciences” by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Wilkie has served as president of the Association for Consumer Research, an international professional group with more than 1,600 members in 30 nations; as an Academic Advisory Board member for the Marketing Science Institute; a member of the Advisory Board for the Applied Economics Research Bulletin; and as a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, among others.